America's Biggest Mass Trial, the Rise of the Justice Department, and the Fall of the IWW

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H-HOAC Review: Shapiro on Strang, Keep the Wretches in Order: America's Biggest Mass Trial, the Rise of the Justice Department, and the Fall of the IWW

Discussion published by John Haynes on Monday, August 9, 2021

Dean A. Strang. Keep the Wretches in Order: America's Biggest Mass Trial, the Rise of the Justice Department, and the Fall of the IWW. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019. 344 pp. $36.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-299-32330-1.

Reviewed by Shelby Shapiro (Independent Scholar)Published on H-Socialisms (August, 2021) Commissioned by Gary Roth (Rutgers University - Newark)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=56024

Destroying the IWW

Interest in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), or Wobblies, seems to come in waves: the 1950s saw Fred Thompson’s The I.W.W.: Its First Fifty Years (1955) while the 1960s brought Joyce Kornbluh’s Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology (1964), Robert Tyler’s Rebels of the Woods: The I.W.W. in the Pacific Northwest (1967), Patrick Renshaw’s The Wobblies: The Story of the IWW and Syndicalism in the United States (1967), Ian Turner’s Sydneys’s Burning (1967), and Melvyn Dubofsky’s We Shall Be All (1969), to cite but a few. Entries for the twenty-first century include Lucien van der Walt’s PhD dissertation, “Anarchism and Syndicalism in South Africa, 1904-1921: Rethinking the History of Labour and the Left” (2007); Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW, edited by Peter Cole, David Struthers, and Kenyon Zimmer (2017), and Peter Cole’sBen Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly(2021). To this list must now be added Dean A. Strang’s Keep the Wretches in Order: America’s Biggest Mass Trial, the Rise of the Justice Department, and the Fall of the IWW (2019).

A defense attorney and legal scholar, Strang has written the first comprehensive account of the 1917 federal prosecution of leaders of the IWW for violating the Espionage and the Selective Service Acts. This marked a new method of fighting radical labor. Before 1917, employers relied on their own gun thugs, on state militias, or on crimes unrelated to the beliefs of those being tried. Thus the murder trial against Joe Hill: while his true “crime” lay in being a Wobbly, the charge was for a specific murder. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were convicted of killing two men in an armed robbery. Tom Mooney and Warren K. Billings went to jail on trumped-up charges of having bombed a Preparedness Day parade in 1916.

The book is divided into three parts: pre-trial, trial, and post-trial. Part 1 sets the stage: this trial marked a new method of dealing with radical labor. Strang begins with one of the most militant IWW

Citation: John Haynes. Review: Shapiro on Strang, Keep the Wretches in Order: America's Biggest Mass Trial, the Rise of the Justice Department, and the Fall of the IWW. H-HOAC. 08-09-2021. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6077/discussions/8042337/review-shapiro-strang-keep-wretches-order-americas-biggest-mass Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-HOAC leaders, Frank H. Little. The regular responses to militant labor activities had been overt violence by vigilantes, company goons, local law enforcement, or military entities. Butte, Montana, he notes, would remain under martial law from 1917 to 1920. One chapter deals with the birth, growing pains, and development of the IWW. Strang introduces readers to IWW general secretary William “Big Bill” Haywood and other Wobbly leaders. We meet one of the defendants, IWW organizer Ed Doree, putting an individual face to the case as we follow what happened to him and his family throughout the book. Strang presents a short history of the Department of Justice, established in 1870, following the twists and turns of its ad hoc development in response to outside issues rather than a bureaucracy planned from its inception. Strang considers the IWW case as one of the major, formative cases that would have a lasting effect upon the department. US entry into World War I provided the rationale for a different approach to militant labor: a coordinated governmental response.

Part 2 turns to how this new governmental response would be and was put into effect. This section covers everything from arrest to conviction: the trial, evidentiary wrangles, examination and cross- examination, and arguments of counsel. We meet the prosecutorial team, led by Frank Nebeker, and the defense attorneys, led by George Vanderveer. Strang deals at length with presiding judge (and future baseball commissioner) Kenesaw Mountain Landis, described by radical journalist John Reed as “‘a wasted man with untidy white hair, an emaciated face in which two burning eyes are set like jewels, parchment-like skin split by a crack for a mouth.’” His face, Reed wrote, was that of “‘Andrew Jackson three years dead’” (p. 112). Strang summarizes the testimony—and the constant references to Frank Little, absent because he had been lynched on August 1, 1917. Even though not required to testify, many of the IWW defendants, proud of who they were and what they believed, chose to do so.

Strang does an exemplary job of explaining laws, legal theories, and procedures, always being careful to warn readers against “presentism” and guarding against the application or understanding of yesterday’s events, attitudes, and practices in terms of today’s. He notes when and how legal standards changed, whether in terms of theories or standards of proof. Strang’s rendition of the trial and the judge’s rulings is thorough, detailed, and understandable. The United States entered World War I on April 6, 1917. Defendants were charged with violations of two statutes: the Espionage Act (which took effect in mid-June 1917) and the Selective Service Act (which became law on May 18, 1917). Federal agents confiscated an estimated five tons of papers, books, office machinery, stamps, envelopes, and files taken from IWW offices nationwide in a series of raids that ran from September 5 to December 26, 1917. The Justice Department “would assert that the five conspiracies began only ‘on the sixth day of April, 1917,’ the day Congress declared war, and continued to the date of the indictment—a period of less than six months. But even there, that span embraced weeks before anyone could have violated the Selective Service Act and two months before the Espionage Act sprang into existence” (p. 79). Yet much of the evidence introduced and accepted over defense objections stemmed from periods before that time frame. Logically, how could you commit a crime when the law had not yet been approved?

Search warrants required two elements: probable cause and particularity. The Espionage Act enlarged the range of items which might be seized. Strang quotes from a decision by the federal appeals court: “the affidavits, on which the search warrants issued, failed to describe the property to be taken except by reference to its general character, and failed to state any facts from which the magistrates could determine the existence of probable cause” (p. 63). Judge Landis overruled

Part 3 covers the events post trial: going from the Cook County Jail to Leavenworth, the problems of raising money for bail while on appeal, the appeals themselves, bail-jumping by a number of defendants after appeals failed (including Haywood), and the fates of those who didn’t jump bail but remained in Leavenworth. We see the rifts among the imprisoned Wobblies, before, during, and after the trial, as they tried to navigate the course of their imprisonment. Four defendants, including Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, successfully sought severance from the other defendants and were never tried. The choices facing the Wobblies were stark: should they seek pardons or clemency, or serve their sentences? To seek a pardon implied an admission of guilt—that being the case, did they have the right to punish their families? Strang allows readers to draw their own conclusions. We follow their paths after President Harding ended their imprisonment. This scandal-ridden president had something that Woodrow Wilson lacked: a heart. Harding also freed Socialist Party leader Eugene Victor Debs.

Three more trials in other jurisdictions would follow. Defendants in those trials would not be as trusting of the system as the Chicago defendants. Those in the Sacramento case knew what the outcome would be and pursued a silent defense. Strang’s book should put to rest any ideas about Woodrow Wilson as a “progressive,” at least in present-day terms. Jim Crow was accepted as the “solution” to the so-called Negro problem, just as the IWW trials represented a “solution” to the “labor problem.” Wilson instituted racial separation within the federal government and hailed the racist 1915 film Birth of a Nation as “history written with lightning.”

The indictment named 166 individuals, of whom 113 eventually went to trial; dismissals, death, and illness reduced those numbers to 97. The jury had to make 388 separate determinations based on their memories of a trial that lasted some three months and included more than 650 exhibits. In recounting jury deliberations, Strang gives what boxing fans call “the tale of the tape”: “mathematically, using a fifty-five-minute estimate for deliberations, if jurors took just two or three minutes to elect a foreman without debate, this meant that they had spent thirty seconds per defendant on all four counts. That broke down further to roughly eight seconds per count for each individual defendant. Had the foreman done nothing more than read the forty-three-page indictment aloud to the other eleven (even minus the dismissed charge, Count 5), he would have consumed maybe half or even most of the total time the jury gave to deliberating the fate of nearly one hundred men. But juries, of course, do not work mathematically” (p. 162). After the trial, bombs exploded at Chicago’s federal courthouse and post office; those responsible remain unknown to this day. Although many instantly blamed the IWW, even Judge Landis did not consider that a real possibility. A mail carrier died in the blast—a substitute mail carrier named Walt Disney survived.

Oddly enough, Strang does not mention the waves of trials that occurred in the aftermath of the federal trial prosecution: criminal syndicalism cases brought by individual states to end what the federal government had begun.[1] Wobbly Fred Thompson (author of The I.W.W.: Its First Fifty Years, mentioned above) was sentenced to San Quentin and successfully fought subsequent attempts to deport him to Canada, remaining a member of the IWW until his death in 1987. I remain skeptical

Citation: John Haynes. Review: Shapiro on Strang, Keep the Wretches in Order: America's Biggest Mass Trial, the Rise of the Justice Department, and the Fall of the IWW. H-HOAC. 08-09-2021. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6077/discussions/8042337/review-shapiro-strang-keep-wretches-order-americas-biggest-mass Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 3 H-HOAC about Strang’s argument that the IWW prosecution functioned as a formative factor in the evolution of the Department of Justice; certainly other factors came into play: the Ku Klux Klan cases following Reconstruction, the monitoring of World War I war production and price controls, and matters related to interstate transportation and communication systems. Nonetheless, Strang draws on court records, trial transcripts, archival materials, newspaper accounts and editorials, memoirs, and biographies to create a “must-read” for those interested in labor history, radicalism, and criminal law, filling an important void in IWW history. For the book's title, Strang quotes assistant attorney general William C. Fitts, who snarled: “fear is the only force … that will keep the wretches in order.”

Notes

[1]. See for example, Patrick Renshaw, “The IWW and the Red Scare 1917-24,”Journal of Contemporary History 3, no. 4 (October 1968): 63-72; 70.

[2]. Strang mentions the Alien Registration Act of 1940, better known as the Smith Act, writing that "while the Justice Department first prosecuted suspected Nazis under it, the department mostly invoked the Smith Act against communism” (p. 246). Suspected Nazis, however, did not receive Smith Act attention until 1942. The first left-wing radicals to be targets of the act were Trotskyists belonging to the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and a Teamsters’ Union local under its control. It is worth noting that “the CP’s [Communist Party] Daily Worker patriotically applauded the Minneapolis indictments.” M. J. Heale, American Anticommunism: Combatting the Enemy Within, 1830-1970 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 131. The Justice Department did not prosecute Communist Party leaders until 1948, at which point the Communists cried foul and began picketing the courthouse. An SWP leader, Farrell Dobbs, came to the defense of the Communist Party which had supported the government during his own prosecution six years earlier. Farrell Hobbs, “Letter to the Editor,” New York Times, July 24, 1948.

Citation: Shelby Shapiro. Review of Strang, Dean A., Keep the Wretches in Order: America's Biggest Mass Trial, the Rise of the Justice Department, and the Fall of the IWW. H-Socialisms, H-Net Reviews. August, 2021. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=56024

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.